Wednesday, 31 March 2010

NASA was able to put a man on the moon, but the space agency can't tell you what the temperature was when it did. By its own admission, NASA's temperature records are in even worse shape than the besmirched Climate-gate data.

E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) -- the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails -- and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center.

The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA's data "was more accurate" than other climate-change data sets, NASA's Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said "the National Climatic Data Center's procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate," admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings.

"My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC's data for the U.S. means and [East Anglia] data for the global means," Ruedy told the reporter.

"NASA's temperature data is worse than the Climate-gate temperature data. According to NASA," wrote Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who uncovered the e-mails. Horner is skeptical of NCDC's data as well, stating plainly: "Three out of the four temperature data sets stink."

Global warming critics call this a crucial blow to advocates' arguments that minor flaws in the "Climate-gate" data are unimportant, since all the major data sets arrive at the same conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer. But there's a good reason for that, the skeptics say: They all use the same data.

"There is far too much overlap among the surface temperature data sets to assert with a straight face that they independently verify each other's results," says James M. Taylor, senior fellow of environment policy at The Heartland Institute.

"The different groups have cooperated in a very friendly way to try to understand different conclusions when they arise," said Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in the same 2007 e-mail thread. Earlier this month, in an updated analysis of the surface temperature data, GISS restated that the separate analyses by the different agencies "are not independent, as they must use much of the same input observations."

Neither NASA nor NOAA responded to requests for comment. But Dr. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground, still believes the validity of data from NASA, NOAA and East Anglia would be in jeopardy only if the comparative analysis didn't match. "I see no reason to question the integrity of the raw data," he says. "Since the three organizations are all using mostly the same raw data, collected by the official weather agency of each individual country, the only issue here is whether the corrections done to the raw data were done correctly by CRU."

Corrections are needed, Masters says, "since there are only a few thousand surface temperature recording sites with records going back 100+ years." As such, climate agencies estimate temperatures in various ways for areas where there aren't any thermometers, to account for the overall incomplete global picture.

"It would be nice if we had more global stations to enable the groups to do independent estimates using completely different raw data, but we don't have that luxury," Masters adds. "All three groups came up with very similar global temperature trends using mostly the same raw data but independent corrections. This should give us confidence that the three groups are probably doing reasonable corrections, given that the three final data sets match pretty well."

But NASA is somewhat less confident, having quietly decided to tweak its corrections to the climate data earlier this month.

In an updated analysis of the surface temperature data released on March 19, NASA adjusted the raw temperature station data to account for inaccurate readings caused by heat-absorbing paved surfaces and buildings in a slightly different way. NASA determines which stations are urban with nighttime satellite photos, looking for stations near light sources as seen from space.

Of course, this doesn't solve problems with NASA's data, as the newest paper admits: "Much higher resolution would be needed to check for local problems with the placement of thermometers relative to possible building obstructions," a problem repeatedly underscored by meteorologist Anthony Watts on his SurfaceStations.org Web site. Last month, Watts told FoxNews.com that "90 percent of them don't meet [the government's] old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule' for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we've got documentation."

Still, "confidence" is not the same as scientific law, something the public obviously recognizes. According to a December survey, only 25 percent of Americans believed there was agreement within the scientific community on climate change. And unless things fundamentally change, it could remain that way, said Taylor.

"Until surface temperature data sets are truly independent of one another and are entrusted to scientists whose objectivity is beyond question, the satellite temperature record alone will not have any credibility," he said.

Tuesday, 30 March 2010

It is becoming difficult to keep pace with the speed at which the global warming scam is now unravelling. The latest reversal of scientific “consensus” is on livestock and the meat trade as a major cause of global warming – one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to eco-vegetarian cranks. Now a scientific report delivered to the American Chemical Society says it is nonsense. The Washington Times has called it “Cowgate”.

The cow-burp hysteria reached a crescendo in 2006 when a United Nations report ominously entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” claimed: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.” This led to demands in America for a “cow tax” and a campaign in Europe at the time of the Copenhagen car crash last December called Less Meat=Less Heat.

Now a report to the American Chemical Society by Frank Mitloehner, an air quality expert at the University of California at Davis, has denounced such scare-mongering as “scientifically inaccurate”. He reveals that the UN report lumped together digestive emissions from livestock, gases produced by growing animal feed and meat and milk processing, to get the highest possible result, whereas the traffic comparison only covered fossil fuel emissions from cars. The true ratio, he concludes, is just 3 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in America are attributable to rearing of cattle and pigs, compared with 26 per cent from transport.

Mitloehner also makes the deadly serious point: “Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.” Precisely. The demonising of cows and pigs is just another example of global warmists’ callous indifference to starvation in the developing world, as in the case of the unbelievably immoral and reckless drive for biofuels – pouring Third World resources for subsistence into Western liberals’ fuel tanks – and, notoriously, carbon trading.

Week by week the AGW collapse intensifies. Himalayan glaciers, polar bears, Arctic ice, Amazon rainforests, all discredited. Now it turns out the great cow-burp scare is bovine excrement too. The global warming scam is, to the majority of people, an object of derision. The scientific community has also at last wakened up. They are smelling the coffee in more and more institutions these days.

This week the Science Museum in London announced it is revising its stance so that its Climate Change Gallery will now be renamed the Climate Science Gallery, to reflect its new position of neutrality in the climate debate. Chris Rapley, the director, said the museum was taking a different approach after observing how the debate had been affected by leaked e-mails and overstatements of the dangers of global warming. He said: “We have come to realise, given the way this subject has become so polarised over the past three to four months, that we need to be respectful and welcoming of all views on it.”

When did you ever hear that sort of thing before? But that is fair enough: neutrality, a level playing field and an equal voice is all global warming sceptics have ever asked for. Given those reasonable conditions, the truth will out and we will win. The signs are that a lot of scientists have been moved to assert their integrity, encouraged by the increasingly huge breaches sceptics have made in the defences of the AGW camp. Others may simply have calculated they may have backed a loser and it is time to take out some insurance.

Whatever the case, it is a different world now in the war against the AGW scam. Zac Goldsmith, warmist fanatic and Tory candidate, is telling environmentalists that green issues are vote losers. He should tell Dave that and stop him making an even bigger fool of himself. We are experiencing a tipping point in the climate war and the advantage is slowly but irresistibly moving towards the sceptics.

Saturday, 27 March 2010

In a new blow to the climate change lobby, Russia's top weatherman today announced that the winter now drawing to a close in Siberia may turn out to be the coldest on record.

'The winter of 2009-10 was one of the most severe in European part of Russia for more than 30 years, and in Siberia it was perhaps the record breaking coldest ever,' said Dr Alexander Frolov, head of state meteorological service Rosgidromet.

Statistics are still being analysed in detail, but it is known that in western Siberia the mean temperature was minus 23.2C, with more colder days than in previous years.

Some 63 days were colder than minus 25C and 39 days below minus 30C.

For this part of Siberia, this represents the coldest conditions in 40 years and the second harshest winter in 110 years.

Equivalent statistics for colder eastern Siberia have not been issued yet.

The coldest recorded temperature in the recent winter is believed to have been minus 57.4C degrees in Oymyakon on 20 January.

The remote town in eastern Siberia is the coldest inhabited community in the world.

'When we say that this winter in Siberia was record breaking, we are aware that temperatures on some days of other years may have gone lower, but in the most recent winter the substantial cold was staying longer than usual and over larger regions than usual,' said Dmitry Kiktev, deputy head of Rosgidromet.

'There were periods of so-called "monotonous cold" when the weather was less diverse, and the cold remained strong and stable to record levels.'

Mr Frolov also offered bad news for Russians hoping for a speedy respite from the long winter.

'We can officially say that beginning of the spring in Russia is postponed for another seven to 10 days,' he warned.

The Urals and Siberia would continue to face 'winter-like temperatures' well into April, while European Russia would be below average, he said.

Climate change adherents say the planet is warming due to man-made factors but Russian expert Professor Arkady Tishkov said yesterday that Siberia and the world are in fact getting colder.

'From a scientific point of view, talk about increasing average temperatures on earth of several degrees are absurd,' he said.

'Of course we can't say that global warming is a myth and falsification. In many regions of planet the temperature is higher than expected because of human impact.

'But the climate system of the planet is changing according to different cycles - from several years to thousand of years.

'From the scientific point of view, in terms of large scale climate cycles, we are in a period of cooling.

'The last three years of low temperatures in Siberia, the Arctic and number of Russia mountainous regions prove that, as does the recovery of ice in the Arctic Ocean and the absence of warming signs in Siberia.'

Mr Tishkov, deputy head of the Geography Institute at Russian Academy of Science, said: 'What we have been watching recently is comparatively fast changes of climate to warming, but within the framework of an overall long-term period of cooling. This is a proven scientific fact.

'The recent warming - and we are talking tenths of a degree at most - is caused by human activity, like forest elimination, the changing of landscapes.

'The greenhouse gases so much discussed now do not in fact play big role. We have to remember that all the impact of industrial enterprises in Russia cannot be compared with one volcano eruption on our planet.'

On the latest Siberian statistics, Mr Kiktev said: 'This winter does not prove that global warming is a myth, just as recent warm winters do not prove it does exist.

'These are just small peaks in the climate process. What they show, if anything, we will be able to judge in tens of years from now.'

A 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow, claimed meat production was responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions – more than transport.

Its conclusions were heralded by campaigners urging consumers to eat less meat to save the planet. Among those calling for a reduction in global meat consumption is Sir Paul McCartney.

However, one of the authors of the report has admitted an American scientist has identified a flaw in its comparison with the impact of transport emissions.

Dr Frank Mitloehner, from the University of California at Davis (UCD), said meat and milk production generates less greenhouse gas than most environmentalists claim and that the emissions figures were calculated differently to the transport figures, resulting in an “apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue”.

The meat figure had been reached by adding all greenhouse-gas emissions associated with meat production, including fertiliser production, land clearance, methane emissions and vehicle use on farms, whereas the transport figure had only included the burning of fossil fuels.

Pierre Gerber, a policy officer with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, told the BBC he accepted Dr Mitloehner's criticism.

"I must say honestly that he has a point – we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn't do the same thing with transport," he said.

"But on the rest of the report, I don't think it was really challenged."

He said a more comprehensive analysis of emissions from food production was being produced and should be available by the end of the year.

Dr Mitloehner told a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco that producing less meat and milk would only result in “more hunger in poor countries” and that efforts should be focused on “smarter farming, not less farming”.

Earlier this year, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change apologised after wrongly claiming the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 25 years.

Tuesday, 23 March 2010

A member of the House of Lords appointed to investigate the veracity of climate science has close links to businesses that stand to make billions of pounds from low-carbon technology.

Lord Oxburgh is to chair a scientific assessment panel that will examine the published science of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

The CRU has been accused of manipulating and suppressing data to overstate the dangers from climate change. Professor Phil Jones, its director, has stood down from his post while a separate inquiry, chaired by Sir Muir Russell, takes place into the leaking of e-mails sent by him and his colleagues.

Climate sceptics questioned whether Lord Oxburgh, chairman of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and the wind energy company Falck Renewables, was truly independent because he led organisations that depended on climate change being seen as an urgent problem.

Lord Oxburgh has said that he believes the need to tackle climate change will make capturing carbon from power plants “a worldwide industry of the same scale as the international oil industry today”.

The CCS Association has stated that carbon capture could become a “trillion dollar industry” by 2050, but this would happen only if governments made reducing emissions a top political priority. In an interview in 2007, Lord Oxburgh said that the threat from global warming was so severe that “it may be that we shall need . . . regulations which impose very severe penalties on people who emit more than specified amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”.

The university appointed Lord Oxburgh, a geologist and former chairman of the Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, after consulting the Royal Society, of which he is a fellow.

Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for research, said that the university had been aware of Lord Oxburgh’s business interests but believed that he would lead the panel of six scientists “in an utterly objective way”. The panel will meet in Norwich next month.

He added: “We all have an interest in seeing alternatives to fossil fuel energy sources. This is going to be an issue for us all in future regardless of climate change.

“The choice of scientists is sure to be the subject of discussion, and experience would suggest that it is impossible to find a group of eminent scientists to look at this issue who are acceptable to every interest group which has expressed a view in the last few months. Similarly it is unlikely that a group of people who have the necessary experience to assess the science, but have formed no view of their own on global warming, could be found.”

He said the scientists has been selected because they had “the right mix of skills to understand the complex nature of climate research and the discipline-based expertise to scrutinise CRU’s research”.

Lord Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell UK, said: “The shadow hanging over climate change and science more generally at present makes it a matter of urgency that we get on with this assessment. We will undertake this work and report as soon as possible.”

The university expects his report to be published before the summer.

The panel members are: Huw Davies, Professor of Physics at the Institute for Atmospheric & Climate Science at ETH Zürich; Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Professor Lisa Graumlich, Director of the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona; David Hand, Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College, London; Herbert Huppert, Professor of Theoretical Geophysics at the University of Cambridge; and Michael Kelly, Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge. They will be given access to CRU’s original data and be able to interview its scientists.

Professor Bob Watson, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said: “I strongly support the choice of chair and panel members — all world class — and the terms of reference. This should lead to a critical evaluation of the quality of the CRU science.”

Monday, 22 March 2010

Much of the record breaking loss of ice in the Arctic ocean in recent years is down to the region's swirling winds and is not a direct result of global warming, a new study reveals.

Ice blown out of the region by Arctic winds can explain around one-third of the steep downward trend in sea ice extent in the region since 1979, the scientists say.

The study does not question that global warming is also melting ice in the Arctic, but it could raise doubts about high-profile claims that the region has passed a climate "tipping point" that could see ice loss sharply accelerate in coming years.

The new findings also help to explain the massive loss of Arctic ice seen in the summers of 2007-08, which prompted suggestions that the summertime Arctic Ocean could be ice-free withing a decade. About half of the variation in maximum ice loss each September is down to changes in wind patterns, the study says.

Masayo Ogi, a scientist with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, and her colleagues, looked at records of how winds have behaved across the Arctic since satellite measurements of ice extent there began in 1979.

They found that changes in wind patterns, such as summertime winds that blow clockwise around the Beaufort Sea, seemed to coincide with years where sea ice loss was highest.

Writing in a paper to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists suggest these winds have blown large amounts of Arctic ice south through the Fram Strait, which passes between Greenland and the Norwegian islands of Svalbard, and leads to the warmer waters of the north Atlantic. These winds have increased recently, which could help explain the apparent acceleration in ice loss.

"Wind-induced, year-to-year differences in the rate of flow of ice toward and through Fram Strait play an important role in modulating September sea ice extent on a year-to-year basis," the scientists say. "A trend toward an increased wind-induced rate of flow has contributed to the decline in the areal coverage of Arctic summer sea ice."

Ogi said this was the first time the Arctic winds have been analysed in such a way.

"Both winter and summer winds could blow ice out of the Arctic [through] the Fram Strait during 1979-2009," she said.

A number of other factors were also responsible for ice loss, including warming of the air and ocean, she added.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic sea ice "is in a state of ongoing decline". Since 1979, the ice has shrunk by about 10% a decade, or 28,000 square miles each year. The ice reaches its minimum extent each September, when it begins to reform as the freezing Arctic winter takes hold.

Friday, 19 March 2010

Oops! There go another two bricks, tumbling out of the IPCC wall of deceit on man-made global warming – there is not a lot left now; even the Berlin Wall (to which the AGW construct is ideologically allied) has survived better. Unhappily for Al, Phil, Michael, George and the rest of the scare-mongers, these two discredited components are among the most totemic in the AGW religion.

Firstly, a new study, funded by Nasa (which may be feeling the need to rehabilitate itself post-Climategate) has revealed that the ridiculous claim in the notorious IPCC 2007 report that up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could be drastically affected by even a small reduction in rainfall caused by climate change, so that the trees would be replaced by tropical grassland, is utter nonsense. That assertion has already been exposed as derived from a single report by the environmentalist lobby group WWF.

Now Dr Jose Marengo, a climate scientist with the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research and himself a member of the IPCC, says: “The way the WWF report calculated this 40 per cent was totally wrong, while (the new) calculations are by far more reliable and correct.” These calculations were done by researchers at Boston University and were published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. They used satellite data to study the drought of 2005, when rainfall fell to the lowest in living memory, and found that the rainforest suffered no significant effects.

So, the rainforest scare, like the Himalayan glaciers panic, is garbage. A further encouraging feature of this development is that genuine scientists are increasingly becoming emboldened to challenge the IPCC’s junk science: the Academy is beginning to reassert its integrity. AGW without withered rainforests is Hamlet without the prince. It was one of those emotive claims much invoked by priggish children in the voice-overs of nanny-state “green” commercials, lecturing their elders on the stewardship of the planet.

An even bigger tear-jerker was the plight of polar bears, bolstered by carefully cropped photographs of lonely bears stranded on fast-melting icebergs, doomed to extinction. That is the second brick that has fallen out of the IPCC wall. The official legend is that polar bears are threatened with extinction by global warming. The IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group, which has bought into global warming in a big way, has claimed that, of the 19 sub-populations of polar bears (13 of them in Canada, home to 60 per cent of polar bears), eight are declining, three are stable, one is increasing and there is insufficient data on the remaining seven.

Of the eight allegedly declining populations, two of them, including Baffin Bay, are non-contentious: sceptics concede that the two sub-populations, representing 16.4 per cent of the bear population, are declining – but in both regions the temperatures have actually fallen, so warming is an irrelevant issue. H Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, has pointed out that in two regions where the population is growing – the Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea – air temperatures have risen. So polar bears appear to thrive on warming – as scientists claim they did during the Mediaeval Warm Period 1,000 years ago and the Holocene Climate Optimum 5,000-9,000 years ago.

Warmists contest the Chukchi Sea claim, insisting the population there is declining, though they concede illegal hunting by Russians is a factor. Closer reading of their literature, however, reveals some interesting semantics. For example, the Southern Beaufort Sea is listed as an area of decline, on the basis of a fall in cub survival rates and a reduction in the weight and skull size of adult males, which was also observed elsewhere, prior to population decline. So this is a prediction rather than an accomplished fact – just like global warming itself.

The bottom line is the actual statistics, conceded even by warmists: since 1970 the world’s polar bear population has “declined” from 5,000 to 25,000. Some of us would term that a quintupling, but obviously we do not share the same mathematical skills as those who predicted the imminent loss of the Himalayan glaciers. The IPCC and the whole scam it promotes is now irreversibly on the slide. If you have no devastated rainforests and those pesky polar bears keep on doing what polar bears do on cold Arctic nights, you have lost the schoolchildren – and they were almost the last supporters of man-made global warming.

Thursday, 18 March 2010

A funny thing happened on the way to a global conspiracy. Reality killed it. Funny how that happens.

Not long ago people like Al Gore were jetting around the globe taking in vast speaking fees, winning awards, telling everyone that they must give up the things they enjoy to save the planet. These doomsayers all told us we were stupid if we doubted them. They knew better, you see. These people claimed all “real” scientists agreed that mankind was destroying the planet with global warming. That we humans were at fault and the only way to save ourselves is bow down to a world government, pay lots of taxes and give up our cars, our electricity, air travel, light bulbs, blah blah blah.

There was a vast left wing conspiracy in other words. One designed to scare people into giving more power and wealth to statist bureaucrats who were employing the oldest trick in the book. Using fear and guilt to manufacture consent.

They began by locking down major institutions like NASA and Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). Then they got the media on board, the science magazines, the cable networks. They started churning out articles and documentaries supporting the global warming meme. Millions were spent selling the idea, because many of these groups knew that fear, like sex, sells. There are two main motivations that human beings have. The desire to have something and the fear of losing something. They used both to pitch the notion that we could create a “green utopia” by changing the way we did things, and in doing so we would prevent the end of the world. Who doesn’t want to be a hero? Who doesn’t love the environment? How can you argue with that?

But two things happened last year that shot an arrow in the heart of the beast; one of the worst winters on record and Climategate. And the hits keep on coming. Now it turns out that NASA, who claimed for years that their data proves Global Warming is real, was actually just using CRU data all along. And the CRU couldn’t back up any of its data. In fact, they “lost the records” when they were forced to produce them. Oops!

So now these news channels who’ve been trumpeting the story as fact, all those cable networks who spent millions on documentaries hyping it, all those TV shows hawking green as the in color; they all look like fools. Or worse, they look like they were in on what will go down as one of the biggest scams in human history.

What would you do if you were in their position? It’s not hard to understand why they’re carrying on like Climategate never happened. They have a president in the White House as clueless as they are, pushing the Cap and Trade agenda as if those darn glaciers are just about melted. We have to do something fast! Not a moment too soon, kiddies.

The climate scam is worth trillions of dollars and who knows how many millions, if not billions have been spent to win over the public. Too bad the public is losing interest fast. People are increasingly saying it’s all made up or at best, exaggerated. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle, The cat has left the bag. There’s no going back to the lies and spin. But our friends in the media are still living a lie. It’s like they threw a party and only their mom and a few friends showed up. What was once a hip thing to be a part of, like smoking, is fast becoming a loser tattoo on their foreheads.

The public’s trust is evaporating and it’s not helping that many in the media are circling the wagons. As their ratings drop and their Nielsens tank, as the suits upstairs start laying off staff, they’re going to have to deal with reality. Something they’ve tried to deny all these years. Yes, folks. The warm-mongers are in fact the deniers.

The economy is in a down-spiral. Telling people they need to cut back is like rubbing salt in their wounds. Promising them “green jobs” is like telling a 40 year old Santa Claus is coming to town.

The climate skeptics started a snowball years ago that has been gaining size and momentum as it rolled downhill. It’s getting larger all the time. And now it’s headed straight at the media that tried to deny it. They want to pretend it will go away if they think happy thoughts (or gloomy ones as the case may be). But it’s coming at them like an unstoppable freight train and it’s almost here.

Wednesday, 17 March 2010

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) attacked former Vice President Al Gore on the Senate floor Monday, calling climate change "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and claiming that Gore is now "running for cover."

The “hoax” line is an Inhofe standby, but he raised the level of attack on Monday.

In front of the backdrop of a blown up Weekly Standard cover featuring Gore, Inhofe railed on the former vice president.

"After weeks of the global warming scandal, the world's first climate billionaire is running for cover. Yes, I'm talking about Al Gore," Inhofe charged. "He's under siege these days. The credibility of the IPCC is eroding. The EPA's endangerment finding is collapsing. And belief that global warming is leading to catastrophe is evaporating. Gore seems to be drowning in a sea of his own global warming illusions nevertheless. He's desperately trying to keep global warming alarmism alive today."

Inhofe also floated a political conspiracy theory focused on Gore.

He cited a secret “high-level meeting with all [Gore's] global alarmists,” called a recent Gore op-ed in the New York Times a "sure-fire sign of desperation" and compared Gore to an ostrich.

“When it comes to reform and openness and transparency and peer review, and when it comes to practicing good science, Gore stands alone,” Inhofe said. “He wants the world to put its head in the sand and pretend nothing's happening. It reminds me of the two boy ostriches chasing the two girl ostriches. They're chasing them, the one girl ostrich said, 'What do we do? They said, let's hide so each girl ostrich stuck their head in the hole and the boy ostriches gallop up to the clearing and one of them said, 'Where did the girls go?' This is what we're looking at here. They're hiding their head in the sand and Gore's writing this op-ed."

Inhofe spoke for approximately a half hour before yielding the floor. He also mentioned the climate change legislation being worked on by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.), saying that if any form of a cap-and-trade bill passes "people are going to be the losers."

Global sea level and Earth’s climate are closely linked. Using speleothem encrustations from coastal caves on the island of Mallorca, we determined that western Mediterranean relative sea level was ~1 meter above modern sea level ~81,000 years ago during marine isotope stage (MIS) 5a. Although our findings seemingly conflict with the eustatic sea-level curve of far-field sites, they corroborate an alternative view that MIS 5a was at least as ice-free as the present, and they challenge the prevailing view of MIS 5 sea-level history and certain facets of ice-age theory.

Sea-level rises and falls as Earth’s giant ice sheets shrink and grow. It has been thought that sea level around 81,000 years ago—well into the last glacial period—was 15 to 20 meters below that of today and, thus, that the ice sheets were more extensive. Dorale et al. (p. 860; see the Perspective by Edwards) now challenge this view. A speleothem that has been intermittently submerged in a cave on the island of Mallorca was dated to show that, historically, sea level was more than a meter above its present height. This data implies that temperatures were as high as or higher than now, even though the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was much lower

We therefore consider the simple interpretation of our data that eustatic sea level during MIS 5a stood around +1 m relative to present sea level, implying less ice on Earth 81,000 years ago than today. Although this interpretation conflicts with the generally accepted eustatic sea-level curve based on the far-field sites of Barbados and New Guinea, it is consistent with a number of other estimates from around the world, including those from the Bahamas, the U.S. Atlantic Coastal Plain, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and California (4, 6, 22–26) (Fig. 2B).

We considered the simple fact that this geographically diverse suite of sites spans a wide range of presumed isostatic states, yet the suite consistently indicates a late MIS 5a highstand of ~ +0 to 3 m (Fig. 2B). Bermuda and Mallorca, for example, are both tectonically stable, and both have MIS 5e/5a estimates of 2 to 3 and 1 to 2 m above modern sea level, respectively; whereas MIS 5e/5a estimates from Barbados are ~ +5 m and ~ –18 m (2). Any appeal to GIA to account for these discrepancies must somehow take into account the unlikely outcome that different ice centers on different continents (Laurentide versus Fennoscandian) would generate the virtually identical MIS 5e/5a relative sea-level histories of tectonically stable Bermuda and Mallorca.

The very rapid onset and relatively brief nature of the MIS 5a highstand may have plausibly generated lags between the timing of sea-level changes and the timing of coral reef growth, and may provide a partial explanation as to why reefs on Barbados and New Guinea do not record a comparable eustatic height for this event. This and other factors that could be part of the apparent discrepancy are discussed in (9).

Tuesday, 9 March 2010

Al Gore is still out there spouting his lies even after the fraud of “Climate Change” has been exposed. Do you wonder why he’s so desperate to keep the lies going? Read on…

The greatest scandal connected to global warming is not exaggeration, fraud or destruction of data to conceal the weakness of the argument. It is those who are personally profiting from promoting this fantasy at the expense of the rest of us.

Al Gore is the most visible beneficiary. The world’s greatest climate-change fear-monger has amassed millions in book sales and speaking fees. His science-fiction movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award for best documentary and 21 other film awards. He was co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Gore was laying his own foundations. As he was whipping up hysteria over climate change, he cannily invested in “green” firms that stood to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) from increased government regulations and sweetheart deals from connected politicians and bureaucrats. The multimillionaire climate dilettante was given a free pass by reporters, who refused to ask him hard questions about the degree to which he was profiting from the panic he was causing.

With the global-warming story line unraveling, the New York Times allowed Mr. Gore to run what amounted to an unpaid advertisement for his brand of climate-change hysteria. This screed, published Saturday, reiterated his claim that the world faces an “unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.” That’s pretty good rhetoric for the person with the largest carbon footprint in the world.

Mr. Gore is not the only one profiting from climate fraud. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace prize with Mr. Gore, is also the director general of the Energy and Resources Institute. The New Delhi-based research group has received substantial financial grants to examine the issue of the world’s vanishing glaciers, a purported crisis that was highlighted in the 2007 IPCC climate-change report. The glaciology unit is headed by Syed Hasnain, who in 1999 claimed that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035, which became a noted scare quote in the IPCC report.

A more detailed study found that glacial melt was far less pronounced and widespread than claimed by the global-warming proponents. Mr. Pachauri denounced this skepticism as “voodoo science.” However, in January, Murari Lal, who wrote the glacier section of the 2007 IPCC report, admitted that the alarmist claims were not backed by peer-reviewed science but had been included in the report for a political purpose, which was to “impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” No word on whether Mr. Pachauri will return his institute’s grant money, but we doubt it.

The greatest potential profits are possible in the ill-defined “carbon trading” industry, currently valued at $126 billion. The trade in carbon emission credits – a key aspect of the beleaguered “cap-and-trade” energy bill now stalled in Congress – will make quick fortunes for the “carbon brokers” assisting companies with reducing their carbon footprints. But because carbon quotas and the acceptable means of measuring them will be determined by the government, this will benefit those who combine presumed expertise with political access, which in the Obama administration means the climate-change alarmists.

Mr. Gore is heavily involved in this scam through Generation Investment Management LLP, which he chairs, and Mr. Pachauri also has been accused of making millions from carbon trading. The dubious science of cap-and-trade and its productivity-killing implications make the bill unlikely to be passed in an election year, but any moves toward this framework will enhance the fortunes of these and other well-connected adherents to the global-warming cult at the expense of businesses and private citizens.

Given the clear conflicts of interest of those who both promote and profit from climate-change alarmism, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize should be rescinded.

Wednesday, 3 March 2010

Research by hurricane scientists may force the UN’s climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms.

The benchmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that a worldwide increase in hurricane-force storms since 1970 was probably linked to global warming.

It followed some of the most damaging storms in history such as Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and Hurricane Dennis which hit Cuba, both in 2005.

The IPCC added that humanity could expect a big increase in such storms over the 21st century unless greenhouse gas emissions were controlled.

The warning helped turn hurricanes into one of the most iconic threats of global warming, with politicians including Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, and Al Gore citing them as a growing threat to humanity.

The cover of Gore’s newest book, Our Choice, even depicts an artist's impression of a world beset by a series of huge super-hurricanes as a warning of what might happen if carbon emissions continue to rise.

However, the latest research, just published in Nature Geoscience, paints a very different picture.

It suggests that the rise in hurricane frequency since 1995 was just part of a natural cycle, and that several similar previous increases have been recorded, each followed by a decline.

Looking to the future, it also draws on computer modelling to predict that the most likely impact of global warming will be to decrease the frequency of tropical storms, by up to 34% by 2100.

It does, however, suggest that when tropical storms do occur they could get slightly stronger, with average windspeeds rising by 2-11% by 2100. A storm is termed a hurricane when wind speeds exceed 74mph, but most are much stronger. A category 4 or 5 hurricane such as Katrina generates speeds in excess of 150mph.

“We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said Chris Landsea, a lead scientist at the American government’s National Hurricane Center, who co-authored the report.

He added: ”There are a lot of legitimate concerns about climate change but, in my opinion, hurricanes are not among them. We are looking at a decrease in frequency and a small increase in severity.” Landsea said he regarded the use of hurricane icons on the cover of Gore's book as "misleading".

Although the new report appears to criticise the IPCC it could mark a new start, showing that the beleagured body can recognise its mistakes and correct them as mistakes or new science emerge.

The Nature Geosciences study was actually commissioned by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), a UN agency which helps oversee the IPCC, in an attempt to resolve the bitter scientific row that had emerged over the relationship between global warming and tropical storms.

That row dates back to the hurricane season of 2004 when four major hurricanes hit north and central America.

It prompted senior IPCC scientists to give a press conference at Harvard University warning that global warming would cause many more such storms.

The claims attracted worldwide attention but Landsea pointed out there was no science so substantiate them and was so angry that he resigned his post as a senior IPCC author in January 2005, issuing a letter accusing the IPCC of having become “politicised”.

He added in the letter : “All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones.”

The following year seemed to have proved him wrong when North and Central America were hit by a series of tropical storms plus seven major hurricanes, including Katrina, which devastated New Orleans.

However he and other researchers have spent the years since then gathering historical evidence showing that hurricane frequency and intensity vary according to an entirely natural cycle, each lasting around 50-80 years.

The last such surge began around 1925 and lasted until about 1955. Conversely there were declines in frequency between both 1910-1925 and from 1955-1995.

Such findings have generated continuing tension among storm researchers and criticism of the IPCC’s stance, so the WMO brought together 10 leading scientists from all sides of the argument to try to resolve it.

Led by Thomas Knutson, a renowned hurricane researcher at Princeton University, the group also included Landsea and Kerry Emanuel, professor of meteorology at MIT. Kerry was a leading proponent of the idea that global warming meant more severe hurricanes.

Julian Heming, an expert in tropical storms at the Met Office, said: “Several of the authors have clashed in the past so the fact that they have co-authored this paper shows they have been prepared to adjust their stance on the basis of the recent research. ”

The IPCC’s reaction to the paper is uncertain but the organisation has confirmed it is reviewing several recent questions raised over its research and considering corrections where appropriate. One senior IPCC scientist, Professor Chris Field, has said he wants the IPCC to bring in new systems for checking and correcting its reports as important mistakes and new findings emerge.

Last Friday environment and climate ministers meeting in Bali also ordered a separate independent review of the IPCC’s leadership under Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

It followed articles in The Sunday Times highlighting the IPCC’s false claim that climate change could melt most Himalayan glaciers by 2035.

The ministers — led by Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, and his counterparts from Germany, Norway, Algeria and Antigua and Barbuda — said they were not questioning the basic science behind global warming.

Instead, they were concerned with the “aggressive” way in which Dr Pachauri had responded to criticism, including denouncing Indian research suggesting that the glaciers were not melting so rapidly as “voodoo science”.

A spokesman for Gore said the cover of Our Choice was not a scientific diagram but "an artist's rendering of an earth where unchecked global warming has wreaked havoc."

Welcome to Global Cooling

This blog is dedicated to informing, you the public, about the truth of climate change.

“We are told that the earth’s climate is changing, but the earth’s climate is always changing. In earth’s history there have been countless periods when it was much warmer and much cooler that it is today. When much of the world was covered by tropical forests or else vast ice sheets. The climate has always changed, and changed without any help from us humans.”

It's not just Earth that's getting warmer, all the planets in our solar system are getting warmer.